Abstract : This work focused on the laboratory activity in chemistry education, including practical work and stressing on the cognitive resources that are necessary to control this activity. We questioned the place of this practical work, which is constitutive of chemistry, in the general education curriculum.The first part analyses the practical work of chemists in their laboratory, as they expressed it though interviews. The second part analyses the protocole given to the students and the observations provided by the evaluators for testing experimental capacities during the 1999 session of the french baccalaureate. In the third part, we sought in the textbooks of high school for the traces of a possible progressive training in the control of this activity. We looked for progressiveness and coherence in textbooks, considered as instances of a "possible" curriculum